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Honoring Each Day's Loss
I heard two stories today that touched me deeply.
The first was about a tribe in Mexico that grieves every day. Before their evening meal, the family will gather, get down on all fours, and wail for the losses they have suffered in the past 24 hours. Big, small, consequential or not so much—each loss of something or someone loved is acknowledged and honored before the final meal of the day.
"How brilliant," I thought. To recognize and quite literally bow before the realization that every day we experience a little death. To accept that life is guaranteed to break our hearts. To allow the wounded heart to experience its pain. To lean into the grief and allow it to soften the hard places within. And to create a greater opening to the possibility of recovery and healing.
The second story was of a very dignified woman who had suffered the sudden and truly devastating death of her husband. While still early in her grief journey, she was in session with a distinguished psychotherapist who encouraged her to give him her pain so that she might be free of the agony that had her by the throat.
Pulling herself erect, she said calmly and with great resolve, "No thank you. Right now this grief is all I have."
The teacher who was relaying this story wondered aloud how the woman might have responded later in her bereavement as she gained a stronger sense of how life would unfold for her as a single person. Without hesitation I blurted out, "I would always say, 'No thank you.' In fact, I would be more inclined to say, 'How dare you take away my greatest teacher!'"
I understand the woman who clung to her grief as a lifeline. At the time I didn't think of it that way. But I can see now that for at least three years after my husband's death, grief was my one true guide and the guardian of my process for moving forward in life. Thank goodness grief knew where it was taking me, because I didn't have a clue.
In contemplating how I might characterize the pain of loss, I found myself in conversation with what felt like an actual personified presence that spoke to me from the very heart of grief itself. Here is what it said:
My Guide and Guardian
"I am your best friend. Your most authentic guide—because I live so deep inside of you. Some may think me a dark and sinister figure because I am the great disturber of worlds and ideas and beliefs. The false or, perhaps, the incomplete things you have used as crutches.
"You know this about me now. I will only tell you the truth about where something is different. Where an opening exists. Where a doorway can be found. You must open the door yourself. But I unlock it."
Cheryl Eckl's new book, A Beautiful Grief: Reflections on Letting Go, is now available for pre-order at www.ABeautifulGrief.com
Copyright 2012 Cheryl Eckl Communications, Inc.
